While studying law at the Middle Temple, John Manningham (c. 15751622) kept a diary that documented many events in London's court, theater, and pulpit for some sixteen months at the close of the Elizabethan age. He is well known as the main source of our information about Queen Elizabeth's final hours, a performance of Twelfth Night, and "Shakespeare's clever vanquishing of Burbage in their rival pursuit of a woman of easy virtue."[1] He also took notes from some twelve texts that he read as printed books or as manuscripts, including two Paradoxes by John Donne and two others possibly by him but which we know of only through the Diary. Less well known but equally valuable because they help us reconstruct specifics about the pulpit in 1602-03, the Diary's records of more than fifty sermons that Manningham attended provide many quotations or paraphrases as well as details about when, where, and on what scriptural passages clergy preached. Although Manningham often returned to hear certain preachers, he left a record of hearing Lancelot Andrewes only once. But his account of that discourse on Whit-Sunday 1602 "At Westminster [by] Dr. Androes, Deane of that Churche" (fol. 21b) is especially significant, for it offers the only extant evidence of that sermon, one that has not been noted by any editor of Manningham or Andrewes or by any other student of preaching in early modern England.
To determine the extent to which Manningham's record faithfully reflects Andrewes's actual sermon, I will examine a characteristic practice throughout Andrewes's work, the echoing of his own earlier writings, and consider both the presence and the implications of that phenomenon in the present case. I will then look at Manningham's techniques for making Diary entries and the reliability of his note-taking in order to assess how his procedures might have affected his report.
